Welcome to my home page!

I am currently a Ph.D. student with the School of Computers in Dublin City University under the supervison of Dr. Mike Scott.

Research

Side Channel Analysis (SCA) is currently one of the hottest topics in smart card security at the moment  (and has been for quite a while now...). Since their discovery in 1998 (which you can read all about at CRI) an entire community has formed in discovery of greater attacks and countermeasures.

To date my work in this area has involved analysing offensive and defensive strategies for performing mainly fault and power attacks on various algorithms. 

The majority of this work has been performed theoretically, however I have been able to do some
real attacks with Gemplus, who has been instrumental in my research.

Side Channel Analysis

Other/Past Research

As part of my fourth year project in my B.Sc. I investigated whether Agrawal, Kayal,and Saxena's (AKS) algorithm to determine whether a number was prime or composite in polynomial time was as good as they suggested...

This was the first deterministic polynomial time primality test and was a breakthrough in the field. The algorithm proceeds as follows:






























   

Module 2:

Module 3:

The third module in the algorithm is the heart of the primality test in which an identity of primes based on Fermat's little theorem is repeatedly evaluated.

Basically if you look at line 12 in the above algorithm, the congruence is repeatedly evaluated for    a = 1 to 2*SqRt(r)*log n until either the equality is not satisfied i.e. all middle terms in the polynomial do not go to 0 and the polynomial is different that (x^n - a), in which case the number tested is evaluated as composite.  Or else for every value of a the congruence is satisfied and the resulting polynomial is (x^n - a), in which case the number if returned as prime.

Here are the modules further described using flow diagrams...

Module 1:

It consists of three main parts:

                      1. Test whether n is a perfect power
                          Ref: "Detecting perfect powers in essentially linear time", Dan Bernstein.

                     2. Find a suitable r value that satisfies a
                          number of properties (see below).

                      3. Evaluation of a prime identity function

Sponsorship

This research is sponsored by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET)

CW Updated 21.10.05